FROM MARX TO MAO

    The English translations of the texts in From Marx to Mao are from books or pamphlets originating in either the People's Republic of China (Foreign Languages Press) or the Soviet Union (Foreign Languages Publishing House or Progress Publishers). I have limited myself to government publishing houses (for the time being) simply because there is no question of violating copyright laws.

    This, of course, raises the question: are the translations in the respective editions the same? They are not. And the differences may be nothing more than stylistic, or indeed substantive, depending on the text. For example, the differences between the Soviet and the Chinese editions of Lenin's texts are by and large stylistic (at least as far as I can tell, so far). This is a result of the particular English edition from the Soviet Union that is utilized. The Chinese editions are generally "reprints" (only slightly modified, the manner in which the reader is informed in the "Publisher's Note" accompanying each text) of English translations prepared in the Soviet Union and as they appeared in Lenin's Selected Works, which date from the early 1950s and are based on the 4th Russsian Edition of Lenin's Collected Works. When I have not used the Chinese edition of Lenin's texts, I have tried to limit myself to the more recent 4th English Edition of Lenin's Collected Works, which date from the 1960s and include printings from the 1970s that occasionally make "corrections" based on the 5th Russian Edition.

    There is at least one difference that is worth pointing out. The Chinese editions of Lenin's texts are not bashful about including references to Stalin's writings in their endnotes, while the Soviet edition of the Collected Works, prepared in the heyday of Soviet revisionism, rarely contain any such references (the only being, so far, is to Stalin's Marxism and the National Question). Similarly, the discerning reader will notice that some of the publisher's endnotes in Lenin's Collected Works contain revisionist formulations borne of the "Stalinian deviation". The most glaring of these appears in the "thesis that the capitalist mode of production . . . would be inevitably replaced by the socialist mode of production," a thesis which appears nowhere in the writings of Marx and Lenin, and, moreover, a formulation which contradicts the Marxist thesis that socialism is a period (in truth a historical "epoch") marking the transition from capitalism and communism. A critical reading of this material is essential!

    Why have I so "complicated" things by not simply sticking to the 4th English Edition of Lenin's Collected Works? Well, when I began to prepare this material I naturally started with the texts I had at hand. Since the Chinese editions were not copyrighted and I had very few texts from the Soviet Union, while those of International Publishers (the publishing house of the Communist Part, U.S.A., which essentially "reprinted" the Soviet editions) were copyrighted, I had little choice at the time. Had I not been determined to provide the reader with a faithful reproduction of the texts, both substantive and formal (e.g., page numbers for referencing the material), I would have had greater latitude and could have freely reproduced copyrighted editions with no one the wiser. Since then I have gained access to a University library and Soviet editions of some texts. This does not mean, however, that I am going to "junk" the texts based on the Chinese editions that have been prepared for this site. I will leave it to others to reproduce these items based on the Soviet editions.

    In turning to differences of substance, however, where nuiance and subtle shades of meaning can indeed transform a distinction into a difference, such concerns are more likely to arise when it comes to the works of Marx. Soviet translations of Marx's German are not without their critics, not the least of whom are the Chinese. For example, in preparing a "booklet" containing Marx's Introduction (1857) and later his Preface (1859) to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the Chinese publishers, "in comparing these [Soviet] translations with the original German . . . found [it] necessary to make numerous corrections and revisions of the Moscow English version of the Introduction." Which translation is the most "accurate"? In all honesty, I haven't the faintest idea (!!); I cannot read German. I will, however, try to make both versions available.

    I have tried to reproduce the printed versions of the texts as faithfully and as reasonably as posssible in preparing them for the Internet, taking only those liberties which were either unavoidable due the nature of the on-line presentation or which conformed to certain "standard", if not universal, practices in the presentation of written material.

    The "unavoidable" liberties I have taken pertain to such things as the character and lay-out of title pages, the omission of facsimiles of hand written pages (at least for the time being) and blank facing pages, to mention the most obvious. Since most of the texts from Lenin, and to a leser extent from Stalin, are from the Collected Works (in the case of Stalin, the Works ), with numerous explanitory "endnotes" at the back of a given volume, I have retained the pagination from the printed volumes. Where a table of contents for a given text is included in the volume from which it was taken, I have reproduced it, adding only an additional section entitled "NOTES" for easy access. Finally, although it is characteristic of printed texts to have no spacing between paragraphs, all the documents (except one) have "white space" between each paragraph. (I also have versions of each text without this spacing which are available upon request.)

    The one liberty I have taken throughout was borne of the presence of certain inconsistencies in the presentation of non-English words and abreiviations. For example, as one moves from one volume of Lenin's Collected Works to another, the use of Latin abbreviations in his citations of material from other authors appears as plain text (e.g., ibid., op. cit.) or in italics (e.g., ibid., op. cit.) depending on the volume. Moreover, the Chinese editions of Lenin's texts vitually never present non-English words and phases in italics, contrary to standard practice (as I understand it). Accordingly, I have presented all non-English words, with very few exceptions, in italics. (Among the exceptions are naïveté and émigré, which are frequently found as plain text in English language publications.)

    There remain certain formal inconsistencies, or differences, in the texts prepared in the Soviet Union and those originating in the People's Republic of China that the reader may notice and which I have made no attempt to change.

    The Soviet editions, for example, consistently employ spelling based on U.K. English (e.g., labour, favourable, organisation, centre, connexion), while the Chinese editions consistently employ a mix of both U.K. (labour, favourable) and American English (organization, center, connection). The Soviet editions also render, e.g., "labour-power," "surplus-value," "semi-colonial," etc., as single hyphenated words, while the Chinese editions omit the hyphens in favor of two words "labour power," "surplus value," and consistently, within a given text, either employ or omit the hyphen such that in some texts either "semi-colonial" or "semicolonial", or "counter-revolutionary" or counterrevolutionary," etc., appear. No attempt has been made to eliminate this variation; these peculiarities remain throughout.